Pages

Monday, November 2, 2015

Rainbow Rowell and David Levithan St. Louis Signing Recap

Yep, I went to the
Rainbow Rowell signing in St. Louis last week. I can’t believe I got to meet
Rainbow Rowell! She’s so quirky and amazing that I just want her to follow me
around all my life and give me pep talks and tell me jokes. Plus, I could force
her to give me info about Levi. Mwahaha.

Oh! Before I
forget, I also saw booktubers JessetheReader and Jessica
(I think that’s her name?) from PriceisWong at the event. I
didn’t say hi or anything, I just creepily saw them out of the corner of my
eye.

Anywho, I went to
the signing last Tuesday and David Levithan was there as well. Thus, the
signing started out with a discussion between the two of them.

Rainbow joked
about writing fanfiction of her fanfiction and how Simon Snow was a literary
device to further the plot along in Fangirl,
but somehow morphed into something more. She also said that you don’t have to
read Fangirl to read Carry On, just because you might get
stuck on Cath’s thoughts about Simon Snow and Rainbow has actually changed
things from Cath’s version of Carry On.

David was at the
signing to promote Another Day, his Every Day spin-off book that Rainbow
jokingly said wasn’t like “Guylight” (the Twilight
gender-flipped book, Life and Death).
Instead, Another Day can be read as a
standalone without having to read Every
Day, kind of like Carry On,
except it’s just from the female character’s pov. David said he wanted to
explore Rhiannon’s thoughts and her inner questions like “How is she supposed
to love A if she doesn’t know what A is? A boy? A girl? A genderless being?”

And then Rainbow mentioned
dragons and how she was trying to look up how dragons worked and how they could
fly, but then she realized, it was all made-up. She could write her dragons
however she wished since Carry On is
a fantasy book. Rainbow also discussed how she was nervous to write a fantasy
book because it has to have a specific tone, but she thinks Carry On still reads as a contemporary
because of the angsty characters. She even said that it bothers her brother
that she doesn’t follow the fantasy trope through in the book and that she
wanted to grow Simon as a person, not a magician. Her brother was like “Will he
get a sword?” and she responded with “Nah. Maybe he’ll go to law school.”

After the
discussion, Rainbow and David helped read excerpts from each of their books.
Then, the Q&A happened.

One of the
questions had to do with their writing processes. David Levithan talked about
being an editor. He actually edited some of Maggie Stiefvater’s books and even
some of The Hunger Games. This lead
to David making a joke about how if he had written The Hunger Games, it would be all about feelings and Gale and Peeta
would be together, not Peeta and Katniss. Additionally, David talked about his
writing process and how he’s a seat-of-the-pants kind of writer, but he has a
weird quirk—he reads the entire book out loud to himself after writing it.
Rainbow Rowell on the other hand, writes a 1½ page outline and writes from the
beginning of the story onward and, usually, she writes for about four to six
hours in a row.

Another question
was about whether or not David and Rainbow read books within the genre they’re
trying to write in at the time. Rainbow said no because she might steal things
and David said he can, that it doesn’t bother him to do so. But, they were also
asked about whether or not they read fanfiction of their own works. Rainbow
said no because she isn’t the intended audience for fanfiction of her books. It
would be like J.K. Rowling reading Rainbow’s Harry Potter fanfiction. She said
that would be embarrassing.

Once the Q&A
portion was finished, we got in line for the signing. I was in Group 2 out of
five or six, I can’t remember which, so I didn’t have to wait too terribly
long, which is good because I had a long way to drive home.

When I got in
line, I realized just how many books I was getting signed and how heavy they
were to tote around, especially considering the event coordinators wanted me to
hold them all in my arms where they were visible instead of in my bag. I have
no idea why since they didn’t count books or anything.

I zipped in and out of David's line, just because I only had one book for him to sign. (Please ignore my read face in these pictures. It was very hot and very crowded in there.)

When I finally got
to Rainbow’s line, I told her all about how one of my professors is writing an
article about fanfiction, using Fangirl
as her source. I also told her about how that same professor let me skip class,
just so I could get her book signed at the event. Whoop! Whoop!

Then Rainbow asked
me if I had read Attachments, I said
I had. I guess not a lot of her fans have read that book yet. Oh, and she
signed all of the books with different taglines. So cool. Normally authors just
sign their name with a tagline only on the book they are currently promoting.

After my books
were signed, I hustled out of there because my parents were waiting (They drove
me up there since my car is a POC.) and it was super late.

All in all, I
wished I had had more time with Rainbow. She’s the author of my favorite book,
after the Harry Potter series of course, so I wanted to express my awkward and true
love for how fantastic Fangirl is.
Alas, there were just too many people there—I’m serious, there were at least
150 people—but I had a good time, nonetheless.

2 comments:

I'm totally jealous! Two of my favorite authors! I was in St. Louis visiting my boyfriend at the end of September to mid-October. I knew about this signing and it was tempting just to stay for that...but unfortunately I couldn't stay longer. 150 people does sound like way too much, though. Hope you still had fun!

So sorry you couldn't be there! It was definitely fun. And I think the only reason 150 sounds like a lot is because the space was filled up. My dad said there were 200-300 people there and I didn't believe him, but maybe he was right because almost every seat was full. I hope you can meet RR and DL sometime! XD